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Walk-thru Fog Screen
fluor2 writes "Ever wanted a screen floating in air? Two scientists, Ismo Rakkolainen and Karri Palovuori, both from Tampere University of Technology, Finland have come up with an idea. It is called the Walk-thru Fog Screen. The fog screen, consisting of 'fog' that is blown down from top, and the protective laminar airflow creates a thin and crisp surface, pretty undisturbed by the air in the rest of the room, making it ideal for projector usage. People can walk right through this screen of fog. Their next idea is to use the fog as a touch-screen, making it even more accessible." For a screen one can walk through, the image quality is better than I'd have thought.
So will this be installed with a "Wise Old Man" Genuine People Personality in the Captain's quarters of future naval ships?
Will we see giant submarines in the future that go into space and...
Err, sorry. Got sidetracked.
This is cool. In a 1996 sorta way.
I am not really sure what display use it has in the "real world" but it would make a great cinematic effect.
Also you could scare folks in amusement park rides making them think they are about to crash into stuff.
You could also hide behind it and spy on people maybe...
Who knows...
--ken
Bitcoin pyramid: Join here: http://www.bitcoinpyramid.com/r/1427 it's FREE!
The video features a mime. No not a MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) but one of those guys with the white face paint. A very bad choice. If they don't want people to hate their product they sound use *anything* else.
This isn't going to be used in business meetings, where projection screens are available anyway. I guess smoke-screens will be used as advertising space: One could use them much closer to or in the way of the customer flow at trade shows, without risking damage to equipment or consumer. For that purpose, a little image unstability may even prove useful as eye-catcher.
To be honest, it needs work; the top of the screen looks fine, but turbulence causes the bottom of the screen to ruffle about like a flag in wind. Watch the movies provided; the bottom half of the images are all but lost to distortion.
What, like what these guys have been doing for years?
Wasn't this the type of TV set they had in Seaquest DSV for the AI computer?
:-)
Yes it was. It's simply someone that yet again took an idea from Science Fiction and made it reality.
Kinda like thise silly Sattelites, lasers and rockets to the moon
It's just that it seems that science is catching up to Science Fiction alot faster these days.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I thought about making 'real' holograms using this technology. It just _might_ be possible. I think that given enough motivation, and the right people working on this, there can be progress made in the right direction. Why am I hopeful? Well, your mentioning it being impossible motivated me a bit.. :)
Now, I will let my imagination run wild and try to address the problems you mentioned. Even though I am no engineer, perhaps something resembling my ideas might be possible. First, holding the fog in its 'proper shape'. How about a system manipulating the airflow around the hologram? Heavy focused airflow. Or how about a magnetically charged fog, the outline of which easily modelled by means of surrounding electromagnetic fields? Crazy? I don't know. Television would have sounded like a pretty crazy idea too some hundred years ago. (...Doesn't prove I'm right, I know...)
Secondly, creating the image? A system of lasers and mirrors (or something able to _quickly_ change the direction of the lightbeams) surrounding the projection?
Now tell me I'm crazy!
Anyway, it was impressive until I saw what they were showing. All that achievement and technology, and they were showing a Doraemon anime. I think it was a pirate VCD because there were illegible subtitles on the bottom of the screen. The resolution was pretty low. It would have been much better off with a production specifically designed for the medium.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Honestly - if anyone knows a format that can be played on out-of-the-box Windows, OS X and common Linux distros without the installation of any extra software, I'd love to hear about it.
While I don't have an answer to that, I know of an answer that requires a similar amount of work for all those platforms: RealPlayer. Yes, it can be annoying. But it works. I happily use RP on windows and linux, and I'm pretty sure even my old PowerBook 5300 could handle it (just to prove it to myself I'll try it tonight).
No, I don't work for Real. Yes, I work with Real products. Yes, I like 'em. Yes, I'm a geek. And yes, I have a life.
Have EVDO, will travel.
I wonder how well a laminar flow smoke curtain would do with images projected on BOTH sides? The cool effect I imagine is walking down a corridor with several of these screens crossing it. As you walk through the image of a wall with a door in it, you turn around and see the image of the other side of the "wall". Look forward again and you see the next "wall", which you can also walk through to see what's on the other side. The series of images could give a tourist a walk right through a virtual pryramid, or some other interesting tour, like the entrance hall in the opening sequence of 'Get Smart' or MST3K.
...think of a sig, quick! Oh no! Too late... arrrrrgh!!!
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced. - Geek's corollary to Clarke's law
(Some days it works really well, some days it doesn't.)
Saw this as Siggraph as well. It did attract a lot of interest. I walked through it, and most impressive is that you do not feel anything, the airflow is suprisingly low. The biggest problem I had is that the very bright light from the actual projector is visible, I see no way to avoid this and the image certainly looked better the more you are in line with the projector, but that light was blinding.
Also at the same show and more interesting imho:
The most important thing there was a High Dynamic Range display. They placed an LCD in front of a rear-projection display and the combined modulation results in a contrast range of 70000:1. This allows much more realistic images. The images I saw looked like a good slide projector, but could be better in a darker room. There was some registration problems, but they say they are working on using bright white LED's behind the LCD, resulting in a flat screen that is as sharp as an LCD. PS: they patented the idea, which for this I think is ok as long as they actually manufacture an open device, they were a little hesitant to say this, though the current driver is just a dual-headed graphics card and it seems hard to believe you could do much better than that.
Also interesting was a rear-projection globe. It was maybe 6' in diameter and translucent white. This used a single rear projector in the base, reflected off a cone-shaped mirror inside at the top, to project on all sides. They had software showing images of the earth, other planets, continental plate drift. The brightness was suprisingly uniform and the fact that there was a black hole at the north pole was not a problem. A trackball let you spin the globe and the image moves very solidly, indicating the geometry is pretty accurate and they matched it with their image warping software (probably a hardware renderer using texture maps to distort the image correctly). Biggest problem is the room is going to have to be really dark for it to look good.
There was also a demo of those "project on a flat surface" keyboards, and it really works. You can learn to type on it correctly in only a few minutes of practice. Biggest problem I see is that the alignment with the flat surface is critical, the phone manufacturers are going to have to come up with clever folding stands to stand the phone/pda at exactly the right angle. Also it seems obvious to me that the projected image could change, not just to different keyboards, but be used as a display. It requires distortion of the display much like that globe, but even a PDA could do that now.
It has also been done in Vegas 8 years ago at the MGM Grand Hotel's EFX show (now defunct):
I was one of the designers of a MIDI Show Control-to-Allen-Bradley PLC controller specifically designed for this show. The EFX show used dozens of them. These boxes in turn were controlled by Amigas! by Richmod Sound Design's software.
The fog wall in the show was huge, and they would project a scene onto the fog while the actors and props would be moved into place. Then the fog would dissipate and the projected 'scene' would come to life.
--jeffy++
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